Expecting heavy industry greenwashing of this

Devilish that capitalism has made profitability synonymous with efficiency

I doubt speed is an adequate consideration here. Especially considering lack of dedicated protection like helmets and other coverings. Access, usability, price (assuming rental), and dedicated protected lanes for travel are much more important, but harder to manage.

In South Korea u see a lot of electric unicycles and hoover boards. I think the west should adopt that way more. Good public transport + clean personal transport for where it's needed. There are even laptop sized transport solutions that u could store in your backpack. The Honda Motocompacto is also really cool!

It already does. Where I live, you can just rent an electric scooter by the minute/kilometer. Just grab one from the street, scan it in the app and go. Plenty of people who never bothered to get drivers licenses or just haven't bought cars, have electric scooters.

Electric bicycles seem a bit more efficient and comfortable, but scooters are soooo portable. Easier to fit on trains, buses, hallways... And even in your car. Have a car and an electric scooter? Drive to another city, park the car in a lower density area, take your scooter out and go. No longer dependent on intercity transit times, and yet you save a bunch of fuel (because city consumption > highway consumption) and nerves (because fuck city traffic) and don't have to work about expensive and crowded city center parking...

Anyway, new electric scooters start at like 300 EUR for Chinese ones that probably spy on you somehow. Ones with more range and power cost a bit more.

Bikes combined with public transit usually cut down those times massively. And to ask---good, or good by usa standards? Cities in Germany or japan are impressive with how fast you can get places by train.

Also-- people being unwilling to trade a bit of convenience in exchange for a better world is a major part of the problem. I got off my car and started biking for everything, and it was easy. More people could easily do the same. Combined with trains, I can go very far.

Yes but that is never going to happen without putting restraints on the auto industry, which puts big money into preventing public transit from being built, and if its already exists, to destroy it.

Car culture is killing us. I get you're trying to be pragmatic but more is necessary.

I really hate that shit. To suburbs? Sure, that's acceptable cox public transportation prioritizes high density areas.

To city to another city and public transportation takes double of driving? That's bad design. Infrastructure that prioritizes cars no matter the population density is not sustainable, whether that's shown as car traffic or massive deficit to keep roads maintained

A universal building exemption would push a lot of things in the right direction

First, that would be lousy public transit design and the route should be rethought.

Second --- does this hyppthetical bus run other routes? Is it electric, powered by overhead lines?

Of course you can up with niche counterexamples for an argument presented in meme format, but that doesn't mean it's not, broadly speaking, correct.

Sounds like the build out of the transit hubs was bungled.

I've seen this happen once or twice in Houston. Tiny lines that go nowhere and are spun up just so municipal government leaders can say "This doesn't work! Build more highways instead!" Our new "Silver Line" is a great example. It was supposed to be a spoke within a larger spoke/wheel build out, but the state sabotaged roll out of the rest of the network.

Meanwhile, we've got a commuter rail line down Main Street (built back in 2012 for the Olympic bid) that's the third most utilized in the country, just because it gets you into downtown without fighting traffic choke points.

The difference in usage is Night and Day.

Cars and eating meat are some of the largest polluters on the planet, and driven entirely by consumers. The commerical fishing industry exists because you buy the fish. Do not mistake that every individual is part of the problem and we all need to work together to improve reality

As long as they're being purchased as a replacement for buses that are either at the end of their life or being donated to smaller communities, then sure. This said from the perspective of an American whose city, state and federal governments refuse to fund the public transit that we already have. (╥_╥)

Also Germany

To add to what others are saying, you should consider the framing of your question. Progress isn't all-or-nothing. There will still be situations where a truck, van, or car is the best tool for the job, and electrifying them will take time, or require advances in technology. We would still benefit from expanding public transportation and decreasing the need to use a personal vehicle for everyday tasks.

Eventually, though, yes, it would be good to replace diesel trucks with trains where possible, and electrify the ones we can't, when we can.

If you're actually serious, you could replace many of them with something like this: https://www.freightliner.com/trucks/ecascadia/

I'd say long term, neither of those should be problems

The electricity it uses is not sustainable.

Many EV users also go for solar panels to alleviate energy costs. Also as a country's electrical grid modernises, it should make use of a greater share of renewables given they're cheaper than the alternatives now.

It has lots of tracking etc and in some cases remote control.

Slightly less certain, but I'd hope this kind of thing is legislated away at some point. There's also always customer choice, there will be manufacturers that compete on the privacy angle if enough of us care

The main problem with EVs is it doesn't solve any of the problems inherent to cars being treated as the main mode of transportation in a given area. Places like that will see EVs as the solution compared to an alternative of investing into better public transit infrastructure.

Infrastructure that is basically inevitable, since we know now that any town/city that eschews anything but car transit will ultimately bankrupt themselves on road maintenance alone.

the wear of the tires constantly pollutes the environment with synthetic material dust (rubber, plastic, etc). much more so, than from buses, because every car has to move more of its weight around per passenger.

I would suggest different downsizes:

• EVs are much heavies, and they wear down the road, and everything else
• tire particles are going to be the next problem after fossil fuels

Solution: trains, more trains, even more trains.

Serious question: What about Alcohol cars?

I get it that there would be a need to develop better motors to run on alcohol alone and that alcohol's output is lower than gasoline but at least the first part is solvable in the same way that diesel motors got better over time (spending money on R&D).

I ask this because, here in Brazil, Lula tried to implement pure alcohol cars back in his first or second term but faced some backlash both because we didn't had the necessary tech to make good alcohol motors and from a lot of other reasons (one which is probably to be petrol companies fucking the project to keep their gains, which although sounds conspirational, may also be true since it is patently obvious that petrol companies lobbyed against climate change measures).

Also, as long as we don't fuck up the soil by mismanagement, it will be almost carbon neutral in emission since all CO2 output was used to grow plants, which is different from using petrol that needs millions of years to be put back under a rock deep down the soil.

I'd even risk to say that it could even be a net-positive(?) carbon capture since the fiber from sugar cane (for brasil's case) is captured carbon that could be used to fertilize the soil back again.

But I don't think we will see a resurgence of alcohol based cars because, as it seems, it failed here on Brazil and oil companies' greed definitivelly aren't the only reason for that (though I believe it played a smal to medium role)